Starting on September 11, 1982 "Memories With Lawrence Welk" aired 84 shows and then went off. When PBS picked up the Welk show in October of 1988 they aired a lot of them, 52 in the first and second seasons. When they started the 3rd season they started adding "new" shows. They gave us 9 new ones plus the 1985 Christmas Special and the October 1984 "On Tour" special. They were not into doing much in the way of the wrap arounds then so they would repeat the big opening production number at the end of the show and usually add a band number to fill in the time gap. All of those shows were hosted by Mr. Welk himself. Of course the things he told us were naturally outdated fairly quickly. I don't think there was any certain reason the rest were not shown, it was just that they were giving us new shows and repeating the ones they had already used for PBS. By the way the record has improved greatly in the 5th and 6th season they gave us 16 new shows plus "Easy To Remember" (the Lennon Sisters Special), "A Toast to Big Bands" and "Myron Floren and the Welk Stars". The 7th and 8th season they gave us 18 "new" shows, plus two new specials. This year we are getting 23 "new" shows so it just keeps getting better and better!!"

Each show is hosted by a member of the Musical Family.
Commercials have been removed.

According to Margaret Heron (around 1994), some Welk shows will not be available to PBS because of commercial advertisements in the background of the stage.

If you subscribe to the quarterly Musical Family Newsletter, you can get advance notice of the national PBS Welk schedule. Unfortunately, some local PBS stations do not follow the national schedule. You can also visit the Oklahoma Network web site. See my Sources page for the addresses.